A book of images

A . BOOK • OF . IMAGES

W • T • HORTON • & • W • B • YEATS •

University of California- Berkeley

THE UNICORN QUARTOS, NUMBER TWO. A
BOOK OF IMAGES. DRAWN BY WILLIAM T.
HORTON, INTRODUCED BY W. B. YEATS,
AND PUBLISHED AT THE UNICORN
PRESS, VIL CECIL COURT, ST. MAR-
TIN'S LANE, LONDON. MDCCCXCVIIL

A Book of Images." — Page 14, Line 4.

The Publishers are asked to state that " The Brotherhood
of the New Life " claims to be practical rather than
visionary^ and that the "' waking dreams " referred to in
the above passage are a purely personal matter.

A BOOK OF IMAGES
DRAWN BY W. T.
HORTON & INTRa
DUCED BY W.B.YEATS

LONDON AT THE UNICORN
PRESS VII CECIL COURT ST.
MARTIN'S LANE MDCCCXCVIII

CONTENTS.

PAGE

Introduction by W. B. Yeats, ...... 7

"BY THE CANAL," . 17

"CHATEAU ULTIME," 19

"THE OLD PIER," 21

"NOTRE DAME DE PARIS," 22

"TREES WALKING," 25

"LA RUE DES PETITS-TOITS," . . . . . .27

"LONELINESS," . . 29

"THE WAVE," .31

"NOCTURNE," 33

"THE GAP," 35

"THE VIADUCT," 37

"THE PATH TO THE MOON," 39

"DIANA," 41

" ALL THY WAVES ARE GONE OVER ME," . . . .43

"MAMMON," 45

"ST. GEORGE," 47

"TEMPTATION," . . . . . . . -49

"SANCTA DEI GENITRIX," 51

"THE ANGEL OF DEATH," 53

"ASCENDING INTO HEAVEN," 55

"ROSA MYSTICA," 57

"ASSUMPTIO," 59

"BE STRONG," 61

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INTRODUCTION.

T N England, which has made great Symbolic Art, most
people dislike an art if they are told it is symbolic,
for they confuse symbol and allegory. Even Johnson's
Dictionary sees no great difference, for it calls a Symbol
*' That which comprehends in its figure a representation of
something else ;" and an Allegory, '' A figurative discourse,
in which something other is intended than is contained in
the words literally taken." It is only a very modern
Dictionary that calls a Symbol '* The sign or representation
of any moral thing by the images or properties of natural
things," which, though an imperfect definition, is not
unlike " The things below are as the things above " of
the Emerald Tablet of Hermes ! T/ie Faery Queen and
The Pilgrims Progress have been so important in England
that Allegory has overtopped Symbolism, and for a time
has overwhelmed it in its own downfall. William Blake
was perhaps the first modern to insist on a difference ;
and the other day, when I sat for my portrait to a German
Symbolist in Paris, whose talk was all of his love for
Symbolism and his hatred for Allegory, his definitions

7

A BOOK OF IMAGES.

were the same as William Blake's, of whom he knew
nothing. William Blake has written, *' Vision or imagi-
nation"— meaning symbolism by these words — ''is a repre-
sentation of what actually exists, really or unchangeably.
Fable or Allegory is formed by the daughters of Memory."
The German insisted in broken English, and with many
gestures, that Symbolism said things which could not be
said so perfectly in any other way, and needed but a right
instinct for its understanding ; while Allegory said things
which could be said as well, or better, in another way,
and needed a right knowledge for its understanding. The
one gave dumb things voices, and bodiless things bodies ;
while the other read a meaning — which had never lacked
its voice or its body — into something heard or seen, and
loved less for the meaning than for its own sake. The only
symbols he cared for were the shapes and motions of the
body ; ears hidden by the hair, to make one think of a mind
busy with inner voices ; and a head so bent that back and
neck made the one curve, as in Blake's Vision of Blood-
thirstiness, to call up an emotion of bodily strength ; and
he would not put even a lily, or a rose, or a poppy into a
picture to express purity, or love, or sleep, because he
thought such emblems were allegorical, and had their
meaning by a traditional and not by a natural right. I
said that the rose, and the lily, and the poppy were so
married, by their colour, and their odour, and their use, to
love and purity and sleep, or to other symbols of love

8

INTRODUCTION.

and purity and sleep, and had been so long a part of the
imagination of the world, that a symbolist might use them
to help out his meaning without becoming an allegorist.
I think I quoted the lily in the hand of the angel in
Rossetti's Annunciation, and the lily in the jar in his
Childhood of Mary Virgin, and thought they made the
more important symbols, — the women's bodies, and the
angels' bodies, and the clear morning light, take that
place, in the great procession of Christian symbols, where
they can alone have all their meaning and all their beauty.
It is hard to say where Allegory and Symbolism
melt into one another, but it is not hard to say where
either comes to its perfection ; and though one may
doubt whether Allegory or Symbolism is the greater in
the horns of Michael Angelo's Moses, one need not doubt
that its symbolism has helped to awaken the modern
imagination; while Tintoretto's Origin of the Milky Way,
which is Allegory without any Symbolism, is, apart from
its fine painting, but a moment's amusement for our
fancy. A hundred generations might write out what
seemed the meaning of the one, and they would write
different meanings, for no symbol tells all its meaning
to any generation ; but when you have said, '' That
woman there is Juno, and the milk out of her breast is
making the Milky Way," you have told the meaning of
the other, and the fine painting, which has added so
much unnecessary beauty, has not told it better.

9

A BOOK OF IMAGES.

2. All Art that is not mere story-telling, or mere
portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those
symbolic talismans which mediaeval magicians made with
complex colours and forms, and bade their patients
ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy ; for it
entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of
the Divine Essence. A person or a landscape that is
a part of a story or a portrait, evokes but so much
emotion as the story or the portrait can permit without
loosening the bonds that make it a story or a portrait ;
but if you liberate a person or a landscape from the
bonds of motives and J;heir actions, causes and their
effects, and from all bonds but the bonds of your love,
it will change under your eyes, and become a symbol
of an infinite emotion, a perfected emotion, a part of the
Divine Essence ; for we love nothing but the perfect,
and our dreams make all things perfect, that we may
love them. Religious and visionary people, monks and
nuns, and medicine-men, and opium-eaters, see symbols in
their trances ; for religious and visionary thought is thought
about perfection and the way to perfection ; and symbols
are the only things free enough from all bonds to speak
of perfection.

Wagner's dramas, Keats' odes, Blake's pictures and
poems, Calvert's pictures, Rossetti's pictures, Villiers
de Lisle Adam's plays, and the black-and-white art
of M. Herrmann, Mr. Beardsley, Mr. Ricketts, and

lO

INTRODUCTION.

Mr. Horton, the lithographs of Mr. Shannon, and
the pictures of Mr. Whistler, . and the plays of M.
Maeterlinck, and the poetry of Verlaine, in our own
day, but differ from the religious art of Giotto and
his disciples in having accepted all symbolisms, the
symbolism of the ancient shepherds and star-gazers,
that symbolism of bodily beauty which seemed a wicked
thing to Fra Angelico, the symbolism in day and night, and
winter and summer, spring and autumn, once so great
a part of an older religion than Christianity ; and in
having accepted all the Divine Intellect, its anger and
its pity, its waking and its sleep, its love and its lust,
for the substance of their art. A Keats or a Calvert is
as much a symbolist as a Blake or a Wagner ; but
he is a fragmentary symbolist, for while he evokes in
his persons and his landscapes an infinite emotion, a
perfected emotion, a part of the Divine Essence, he
does not set his symbols in the great procession as
Blake would have him, " in a certain order, suited to
his ' imaginative energy.' " If you paint a beautiful woman
and fill her face, as Rossetti filled so many faces, with
an infinite love, a perfected love, ''one's eyes meet no
mortal thing when they meet the light of her peaceful
eyes," as Michael Angelo said of Vittoria Colonna ;
but one's thoughts stray to mortal things, and ask, maybe,
" Has her love gone from her, or is he coming ? " or *' What
predestinated unhappiness has made the shadow in her

II

A BOOK OF IMAGES.

eyes?" If you paint the same face, and set a winged
rose or a rose of gold somewhere about her, one's thoughts
are of her immortal sisters, Pity and Jealousy, and of her
mother, Ancestral Beauty, and of her high kinsmen,
the Holy Orders, whose swords make a continual music
before her face. The systematic mystic is not the
greatest of artists, because his imagination is too
great to be bounded by a picture or a song, and
because only imperfection in a mirror of perfection,
or perfection in a mirror of imperfection, delight our
frailty. There is indeed a systematic mystic in every
poet or painter who, like Rossetti, delights in a
traditional Symbolism, or, like Wagner, delights in a
personal Symbolism ; and such men often fall into trances,
or have waking dreams. Their thought wanders from
the woman who is Love herself, to her sisters and her
forebears, and to all the great procession ; and so august
a beauty moves before the mind, that they forget the
things which move before the eyes. William Blake, who
was the chanticleer of the new dawn, has written : '* If
the spectator could enter into one of these images of his
imagination, approaching them on the fiery chariot of
his contemplative thought, if ... he could make a
friend and companion of one of these images of wonder,
which always entreat him to leave mortal things (as he
must know), then would he arise from the grave, then
would he meet the Lord in the air, and then he would be

12

INTRODUCTION.

happy." And again, *' The world of imagination is the
world of Eternity. It is the Divine bosom into which
we shall all go after the death of the vegetated body.
The world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas
the world of generation or vegetation is finite and
temporal. There exist in that eternal world the eternal
realities of everything which we see reflected in the
vegetable glass of nature."

Every visionary knows that the mind's eye soon comes
to see a capricious and variable world, which the will
cannot shape or change, though it can call it up and banish
it again. I closed my eyes a moment ago, and a company
of people in blue robes swept by me in a blinding light,
and had gone before I had done more than see little roses
embroidered on the hems of their robes, and confused,
blossoming apple boughs somewhere beyond them, and
recognised one of the company by his square, black,
curling beard. I have often seen him ; and one night a
year ago, I asked him questions which he answered by
showing me flowers and precious stones, of whose mean-
ing I had no knowledge, and seemed too perfected a soul
for any knowledge that cannot be spoken in symbol or
metaphor.

Are he and his blue-robed companions, and their like,
**the Eternal realities" of which we are the reflection **in
the vegetable glass of nature," or a momentary dream ?
To answer is to take sides in the only controversy in

13

A BOOK OF IMAGES.

which it is greatly worth taking sides, and in the only con-
troversy which may never be decided.

3. Mr. Horton, who is a disciple of " The Brotherhood
of the New Life," which finds the way to God in waking
dreams, has his waking dreams, but more detailed and
vivid than mine ; and copies them in his drawings as if
they were models posed for him by some unearthly master.
A disciple of perhaps the most mediaeval movement in
modern mysticism, he has delighted in picturing the streets
of mediaeval German towns, and the castles of mediaeval
romances ; and, at moments, as in All Thy waves are gone
over mey the images of a kind of humorous piety like that
of the mediaeval miracle -plays and moralities. Always
interesting when he pictures the principal symbols of his
faith, the woman of Rosa Mystica and Ascending into
Heaven, who is the Divine womanhood, the man-at-arms of
St. George and Be Strong, who is the Divine manhood, he
is at his best in picturing the Magi, who are the wisdom of
the world, uplifting their thuribles before the Christ, who is
the union of the Divine manhood and the Divine woman-
hood. The rays of the halo, the great beams of the
manger, the rich ornament of the thuribles and of the cloaks,
make up a pattern where the homeliness come of his pity
mixes wuth an elaborateness come of his adoration. Even
the phantastic landscapes, the entangled chimneys against

14

INTRODUCTION.

a white sky, the dark valley with its little points of light,
the cloudy and fragile towns and churches, are part of the
history of a soul ; for Mr. Horton tells me that he has
made them spectral, to make himself feel all things but a
waking dream ; and whenever spiritual purpose mixes with
artistic purpose, and not to its injury, it gives it a new
sincerity, a new simplicity. He tried at first to copy his
models in colour, and with little mastery over colour when
even great mastery would not have helped him, and very
literally : but soon found that you could only represent a
world where nothing is still for a moment, and where
colours have odours and odours musical notes, by formal
and conventional images, midway between the scenery and
persons of common life, and the geometrical emblems on
mediaeval talismans. His images are still few, though they
are becoming more plentiful, and will probably be always
but few ; for he who is content to copy common life need
never repeat an image, because his eyes show him always
changing scenes, and none that cannot be copied ; but there
must always be a certain monotony in the work of the Sym-
bolist, who can only make symbols out of the things that
he loves. Rossetti and Botticelli have put the same face
into a number of pictures ; M. Maeterlinck has put a
mysterious comer, and a lighthouse, and a well in a wood
into several plays ; and Mr. Horton has repeated again
and again the woman of Rosa Mystica, and the man-at-
arms of Be Strong ; and has put the crooked way of The

15

A BOOK OF IMAGES.

Path to the Moon, **the straight and narrow way" into St,
George, and an old drawing in The Savoy \ the abyss of
The Gap, the abyss which is always under all things, into
drawings that are not in this book ; and the wave of The
Wave, which is God's overshadowing love, into All Thy
waves are gone over me.

These formal and conventional images were at first but
parts of his waking dreams, taken away from the parts that
could not be drawn ; for he forgot, as Blake often forgot,
that you should no more draw the things the mind has seen
than the things the eyes have seen, without considering
what your scheme of colour and line, or your shape and
kind of paper can best say : but his later drawings, Sancta
Dei Genitrix and Ascending into Heaven for instance, show
that he is beginning to see his waking dreams over again
in the magical mirror of his art. He is beginning, too, to
draw more accurately, and will doubtless draw as accurately
as the greater number of the more visionary Symbolists,
who have never, from the days when visionary Symbolists
carved formal and conventional images of stone in Assyria
and Egypt, drawn as accurately as men who are interested
in things and not in the meaning of things. His art is
immature, but it is more interesting than the mature art of
our magazines, for it is the reverie of a lonely and profound
temperament.

W. B. YEATS.

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THIS BOOK WAS PRINTED BY MESSRS. MORRISON AND GIBB, TANFIELD, EDINBURGH.
THE BLOCKS WERE ENGRAVED BY THE ART REPRODUCTION COMPANY, LONDON.

^t the i9.nicom IPrcss.

MM. RODIN, PANTIN-LATOUR, AND
LEQROS.

Three Lithographed Drawings by Will Rothenstein. In a
Wrapper, Price £2^ 2S. each set.

*^* These Portraits were made from sittings given in Paris in 1897. Only fifty
copies of each drawing were printed (by Mr. Way), and the stones have been destroyed.
Twenty-five sets (each drawing on hand-made Van Guelder paper and signed by the
Artist) now remain for sale.

MR. AUBREY BEARDSLEY.

A Lithographed Drawing by Will Rothenstein. Price £1, is.

*^^* No later Portrait than this appears to have been made. After the first few
trial proofs only fifty copies were printed, and the stone has been destroyed. The
few copies now offered are all numbered and signed Artist's Proofs.

PIRANESrS "CARCERL"

Sixteen Plates, each measuring 21 by 16 inches over all, with an
Introduction by E. J. Oldmeadow. Two hundred copies
only. Price £2, 2S. nef. \Nearly ready.

A BOOK OF GIANTS.

Drawn, engraved, and written by William Strang. Fcap. ^tOy
in a binding designed by the Author. Price 2S. 6d. net.

*^^* " A Book of Giants " contains twelve original wood engravings, accompanied
by humorous verses. Admirers and collectors of Mr. Strang's etchings will hasten to
acquire copies of this, his first published set of woodcuts ; but its interest for a wider
public, and as a children's book, should be only a degree less great.

Twenty-five copies, printed from the original blocks, will be hand-coloured by
Mr. Strang. Particulars of this edition may be obtained from the Publishers.

A BOOK OF IMAGES.

Drawn by W. T. Horton, and Introduced by W. B. Yeats.
Fcap. Svo, boards. Price 2S. 6d. net.

*»* This book contains twenty-four drawings, including a set of Imaginary Land-
scapes and a number of Mystical Pieces.

VERISIMILITUDES.

A Volume of Stories by Rudolf Dircks. Imperial i6i7to, cloth^
gilt. 3s. 6d.

The Manchester Courier : — " Mr. Dircks is one of the cleverest writers of the
day. . . . Sure analysis of character, artistic use of incident. . . . The volume will be
highly valued by lovers of short stories."

The Star : — *' Good work. Mr. Dircks has insight and the courage to efface .
himself; he is uncompromisingly true to his subjects; and he knows to a hair's-
breadth what a short story can and cannot do. . . . Well worth reprinting in the
exquisite form given them by the publishers."

The Whitehall Review :— " Great and nervous originality. ... A masterly
observer. ... A number of pictures of the emotions, drawn with a fearless truth that
is as delightful as it is rare, . . . by a genuine artist."

SHADOWS AND FIREFLIES.

By Louis Barsac. Imp. i6mo, bevelled and extra gilt. Price
3S. 6d. net. Second Edition.

The Outlook : — " Mr. Barsac has a genuine gift of expression and a refined
sense of natural beauty."

" J. D." in The Star : — " The sonnets attain a particularly high level. The Earth
Ship ... is splendidly imagined and splendidly wrought. ... In all there is strong
evidence of original poetical talent."

The New Age : — " One of the most promising efforts of the younger muse since
the early volumes of Mr. William Watson and Mr. John Davidson."

THE LITTLE CHRISTIAN YEAR:

A Book of Prayers and Verses. Medium idmo^ parchment, gilt
top. Price 2S. 6d. net. \Just ready.

THE DOME.

A Quarterly. One Hundred pages. Pott ^to, boards. Price is.
net^ or 5s. per annum, post free.

*^* Each number of The Dome contains about twenty examples of Music,
Architecture, Literature, Drawing, Painting, and Engraving, including several Coloured
Plates. Among the Contributors to the first five numbers are — Louis Barsac,
Laurence Binyon, Vernon Blackburn, H. W. Brewer, Ingeborg von Bronsart, L.
Dougall, Olivier Destree, Campbell Dodgson, Edward Elgar, Charles Holmes,
Laurence Housman, W. T. Horton, Edgardo Levi, Liza Lehmann, Alice Meynell,
J. Moorat, W. Nicholson, Charles Pears, Stephen Phillips, Beresford Pite, J. F.
Runciman, Byam Shaw, Arthur Symons, Francis Thompson, F. Viele-Griffin, Gleeson
White, J. E. Woodmeald, Paul WoodroflFe, and W. B. Yeats.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIB^

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